Race

Blog: An interview with Sarah Derbew, author of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity Lylaah Bhalerao Tue, 11/01/2022 - 13:39

When Sarah Derbew and I join our bi-coastal Zoom call to discuss her recent book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, she is in her office in Stanford, where she is Assistant Professor of Classics, and I am in my new apartment in Brooklyn, where she grew up. In fact, I tell her, I am walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum where the artwork she chose for the cover of the book, Fred Wilson’s Grey Area (Brown version), is housed. Some people might be surprised to find this image on the cover for a book about Greek antiquity, because it depicts Egyptian art. I ask her why she chose it and what it means to her.

The book cover of "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity." Above the title is a photo of five of the same Egyptian busts in a row, each an increasingly darker shade of brown.
Figure 1: The cover of Sarah Derbew's book, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity."

Before we get into the book itself, I take her back to the origins of her ideas about race in antiquity. She says she became interested in these issues at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where she went before her Ph.D. at Yale. There she “met so many people from different backgrounds who cared deeply about ancient languages and ancient cultures.”

She also valued the importance of seeing non-white educators of the Classics. “A lot of my classmates were teaching in public schools, so I really got to start seeing educators look very different from what I was used to in college or high school, when I was learning Latin.” She herself spent time volunteering at the Brooklyn Latin School.

Blog: Teaching in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence: Reflections on Asian & Asian American Experiences in Classical Studies, Part 2 Kate Brassel Fri, 07/08/2022 - 12:56

This is a two-part blog post reflecting upon AAPI experiences in classical studies. Part 1 reflected upon the author’s personal experience teaching race & ethnicity in antiquity in the context of the ongoing surge of anti-Asian violence in the country. Part 2 reflects upon the shared experiences of students and scholars of Asian descent in classical studies through a series of interviews.

Curious about whether other people of Asian descent in Classical Studies have had experiences similar to mine and how that affects our lives in the field, I reached out this spring to scholars and students from other institutions in North America, public and private, large and small, through the recently formed Asian & Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC).

Blog: Teaching in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence: Reflections on Asian & Asian American Experiences in Classical Studies, Part 1 Kate Brassel Mon, 06/27/2022 - 09:05

This two-part series reflects upon AAPI experiences in Classical Studies. Part 1 is catalyzed by the author’s personal experience teaching race & ethnicity in antiquity in the context of the ongoing surge of anti-Asian violence in the country. Part 2 will reflect upon the shared experiences of students and scholars of Asian descent in Classical Studies through a series of interviews.

“Do you know about your Penn Law School colleague Amy Wax?,” a friend texted me in January, as the semester was starting.

Blog: Call It What It Is: Racism and Ancient Enslavement Javal Coleman Mon, 12/13/2021 - 12:35

To say that there was such a thing as racism in classical antiquity would strike most modern readers as odd. However, if we examine what racism means, it is not as striking. The modern connotations of “racism” often instantly call up differences in biological features such as skin color. Historians of antiquity, such as Frank Snowden, have examined ancient evidence in search of racial hatred, working from these modern assumptions about what “race” is. Given those assumptions, Snowden concluded that the ancients did not have an idea of racism or hatred of black people more specifically.

Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Racialized Commodities: Thinking about Trade, Mobility, and Race in the Archaic Mediterranean

By Christopher Parmenter | September 27, 2021

One of the fascinations occupying Classical Studies in North America and Western Europe during the 1980s and 1990s was the way images refract the particularities of societies that produce them. One look at the imaginary of sixth- or fifth-century Athens would provide you a blistering array of human forms: doughty warriors, mourning women, drunken gods; the young and the old, Greek and barbarian. This last pair seemed especially interesting at the twilight of the Cold War.